Meeting notes 2/9
"You picked the right time, but the wrong guy" - Kendrick Lamar
Hi all,
So great to see everyone today! A few hundred of you joined.
“As we enter this uncharted territory, the People, in their wisdom, will need to remain ever attentive, consistently filling their established role in our constitutional democracy, and thus collectively serving as the ultimate safeguard against any chaos spawned by this Court’s decision.” (written by Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, after the Supreme Court majority voted to allow presidential immunity). We, the People, have the power, and it is time to take action. I feel hope in how many of you showed up today, ready to do so.
As always, starting with action items for the week, events, and then the meeting summary below for those who want to read it. At the end, some housekeeping for those that are new. Writing this post Super Bowl (Go Eagles!) and recovering from illness before I dive into a work week so excuse any errors or anything missing.
Next meeting will be on 2/23 at Lakewood Social, 3-4:30. It’s the last one on the old mobilize, sign up here. Common Cause NC will be joining us! All future meetings can be found here.
ACTION ITEMS (there are always more - here’s a start)
Call: call Tillis & Budd and ask them to oppose the dangerous nominees: RFK Jr, Gabbard, Patel, and McMahon. Demand that they investigate what Musk is doing. Remember, Budd is on the Intelligence Committee and this is a HUGE national security concern (You can also ask them “what are you doing to stop 20 year old racists from stealing my personal data and yours?”). Emily Amick has a great Substack from this past week on calling your reps. Check it out here. Here’s her generic script: “Hello, my name is [NAME] and I live in [ZIPCODE]. I am a constituent. I am urging the Senator/Representative to do X, because Y. Thank you.”.
Call: Call your Democratic representative in congress (for many of us, that’s Rep Foushee or Ross) and ask them to tell Republicans that they won’t work with them on anything until Republicans stop what Musk and his cronies are doing to destroy the government. Do not give one inch to them. Also make sure they will advocate loudly against the SAVE act, which may come up for a vote in the next week. It’s a monster voter suppression bill (more here).
Join a phonebook: call 60K voters with Down Home NC and Carolina Federation - Feb 7-13th, dates and times vary. Sign up here.
Talk to neighbors & friends: Make sure your friends and family members know about the race and that 60K votes are being illegally challenged by extremist NC Republicans. Check list of 60K voters who are being illegally challenged and look for your friends, family members, and neighbors: go to www.TheGriffinlist.com to search by zip code and even find a map.
EVENTS
Feb 11th: Siembra NC holding a national Defend and Recruit call. Sign up here.
Feb 15-22: Rallies across the state for Riggs hosted by Common Cause NC. Find the one nearest to you! Common Cause will be joining us on 2/23 to talk about what they do as an organization and how you can get involved!
Feb 24th: All In for NC meeting about Communication from 4-5 PM, virtual. This looks really cool! Sign up here.
Feb 27th: Neighbors on Call and County2County Kickoff call: sign up here. "Doors open" at 6:30pm in the Zoom for optional social time. Program begins at 7:00pm and will feature Democratic Caucus leaders NC Rep. Robert Reives and NC Sen. Sydney Batch.
Friday, February 28: Join us for the "Disenfranchised Disco" – a gathering celebrating the voices of 60,000 voters in North Carolina whose rights have been challenged. Dance, plan, rejuvenate, make friends, and make a difference, while connecting with fellow advocates, individuals and organizations, sharing stories, and empowering each other to stand and dance! for justice. Together, we will ensure that every vote counts! Sign up here.
March 8th: Equity Before Birth inventory date for March 8th at 11 am. Please sign up here.
MEETING RECAP:
We briefly went over what Indivisible is and the actions we’ve already taken, both nationally and locally, in the past few weeks. From gatherings outside the treasury with lawmakers in NC on a national level to showing up at Tillis’s office with several hundred folks on Tuesday or packing the Wake County Courtroom, Indivisibles are showing up and making noise. I highly recommend everyone check out the Indivisible Guide 2.0, and you can do so here.
"Brought together by a practical guide to resist the Trump agenda in 2016, Indivisible is a movement of thousands of group leaders and more than a million members taking regular, iterative, and increasingly complex actions to resist the GOP’s agenda, elect local champions, and fight for progressive policies. We make calls. We show up. We speak with our neighbors. We organize. And through that work, we’ve built hundreds of mini-movements in support of local values. After practice, training, and repetition, we’ve built lasting power on our home turf, and a massive, collective political muscle ready to be exercised each and every day in every corner of the country."
We talked about why 2030 is the year that we need to look towards in NC politics. In 2030, we have an opportunity to draw new maps, ones that are not gerrymandered in such an extreme way. Democrats might have kept the house this year and prevented a Trump trifecta if not for gerrymandering in NC (we went from a 7-7 split to a 10-3 split in 2020). We must get a majority on the NC supreme court (currently 5-2, should remain 5-2 as long as they don’t steal the election). Anita Earls’ seat is up in 2026 and then 3 more seats are up in 2028. Make sure you’re following Anita Earls’ campaign!
We then did a breakout exercise to create civic action lists with items from the following 5 categories:
Seek out community. For all of you who have joined the Bull City Indivisible meetings, this counts! I am so thrilled. For those of you who haven’t yet joined, feel free to join anytime and come and go as needed. Below are the ideas that people discussed about community. Examples:
Come to Bull City Indivisible Meetings!
Connect to others in your community — whether it’s other parents at the park, neighbors, people at work — these trusted relationships are going to be important in the times to come.
Build something local. As Leah Greenberg (a founder of Indivisible) says, “for the time being, we still live in a representative democracy. That means your elected officials at the local, state, and federal levels still wake up every morning worrying about what their constituents think. And that gives you power -- if you organize and apply it”.
Examples:
Attend a city council meeting. Start to understand the different coalitions on the Durham City Council.
Volunteer for mayoral and/or school board candidates
Write postcards for special elections
Participate! Even for small things (like writing a few postcards or calling senators), say YES more often
Call senator and representative at least once per week. Find yours here.
Show up at least once at the NCGA
Attend a precinct meeting (February/March should be next).
Keep an eye out for the four Democrats (Cunningham, Willingham, Brockman & Pierce) that are most likely to give Republicans a “functioning supermajority” in NC. N&O article here.
Get involved in school issues. Here is the DAE I mentioned (Durham Association of Educators).
Go to a People’s Alliance meeting. They have HUGE political power in Durham.
Connect with those under threat. Leah writes, “Trump has promised to be a dictator on day one, to go after immigrant families, trans kids, and other marginalized communities. The Project 2025 agenda is a divide and conquer gameplan -- pick us off one-by-one as they dismantle our democracy and hand the federal government over to their billionaire buddies. But their strategy has an Achilles’ Heel -- it doesn’t work if we stick together.” We will be doing a Help Over Hate event on MLK weekend. Stay tuned! People came up with great resolutions to protect marginalized folks in our community as well as volunteerism.
Donate monthly to an abortion fund. Ours in NC is Carolina Abortion Fund. If you set up a recurring donation, you get to check this off for the year! Abortion funds are critically important. Listen to Dr. Bev Gray and Dr. Jonas Swartz’s podcast “Outlawed” to learn more.
Donate to Equity Before Birth (see above).
Attend a Siembra NC training and/or support their work
Support your independent media and social media. Leah states, “The media environment has been deteriorating for years. And with Trump taking office and corporate owners rushing to kiss his ring, It’s about to get a lot harder to be a good journalist in this country. Yes, we have plenty of problems with the anticipatory obedience from the likes of the management and ownership of places like the LA Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and ABC News. But we need to engage, trumpet, and support journalists with a pro-democracy bias -- whether independent actors or embattled fighters for truth in compromised institutions. And we need platforms for communicating the truth and with each other.” Here’s what folks mentioned — for more of a list of things to read/listen to, see notes from our first meeting:
Examples:
Read Democracy in Retrograde & create an intentional news diet. Emily has a great chapter on "developing an intentional news diet”. Her Substack is also fantastic.
Sign up for an action-based newsletter like Democracy Out Loud or Chop Wood, Carry Water.
Listen to Stacy Abrams’ Assembly Required podcast and Hometown Holler’s NC-politics focused podcast.
Subscribe to Bryan Anderson’s Anderson Alerts to stay on top of what’s going on at the NCGA.
Have fun. Leah writes: “Fascism is frightening. But self-flagellating judgment or descending into despair are not gonna help us.” Self care and fun are going to be really important in the months and years ahead. We had a lot of fun talking about this one.
Examples:
Practice self-care. I’ll put a plug in for my the Substack Defending Democracy & Practicing Self Care. It’s amazing, especially this week’s essay. It’s also written by my mom!
Meditate daily
Embrace escapism — it’s important to spend time doing things that feel silly or escapist because it helps us not burn out!
Retail therapy — use Goods Unite Us to make sure what we buy isn’t supporting the Project 2025 agenda (Costco is great, as you know! As is Penzey’s Spices) and shop locally to support Black and minority owned businesses as well as LGBTQ+ run businesses.
Remember to share your lists in the subscriber chat!!!
Lastly, we talked about ways to figure out carpooling to rallies and events - we will work on this! Great idea.
HOUSEKEEPING:
We don’t have an email list - this is it! If you want to join the group, just subscribe to the Substack. You can come to meetings (some meetings, all meetings) or just read along and do the action items and learn.
You can find us on Bluesky and Instagram, where we have an active social media presence. Links to that and a whole lot more on our linktree, found here: Linktr.ee/Durhamgotv.
We are in coalition with so many great organizations in the area - if you or someone you know is involved with one, please reach out! We have Common Cause coming next week, Neighbors on Call coming in March. I am meeting with FLIP NC this week and met someone from the NC Black and Brown Alliance today who is excited to work with us as well. We’d love to work with We are so lucky to be in an area that is so rich with folks doing the work - and the more we work together, the more we can do.
Also, if you didn’t watch the Super Bowl -
had this great summary on her Insta about why we wanted the Eagles to win (other than Trump picking the Chiefs).
Rest up tonight folks, it’s going to be a long week ahead.
We’re not going anywhere. It’s a long road ahead, but we’re in this together.
Anna
Hi all,
Great meeting. I'll be making calls to Rep. Foushee's office reminding her to hold the line on the budget votes until the lawbreaking stops. I'll be calling Sens. Tillis and Budd about the proposed NIH funding cuts, which will cause job losses, the suspension of clinical research trials, and lab closures. This is particularly concerning in NC, where we receive $2.2B in NIH funding, the vast majority of which goes to the Triangle.
I was there! Thank you to Anna for the inspiration. I’ve made 40 calls since this meeting.